Tag Archives: education

Classroom of the future

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I attended Social media Week‘s classroom of the future talk.  See my notes from the higher ed version or my notes on the K-12 version in this post.

Tools in physical classroom

  • Twitter like tool (since twitter blocked at some scools) – back channel during class and after class
  • Social media study groups
  • Blog about what learning so understand it more
  • Text – questions, announcements, ask someone outside school like parent to get outside perspectives. Let cell phones enhance learning and not be a distraction. There is a program that strips out phone number and saves history

Cool: showed live demo of interactive quiz to see comprehension

Be an early tester but a late adopter of technology. It needs to fit your work/life flow. “twitter is for old people”. When did that happen?

Computer acceptable use policy better than filtering because teaches responsibility. [hmm. Maps to coporate america]

Schools behind companies in terms of tech. And companies behind what you do at hone. Income divide. Not everyone has a cell phone. And the district doesn’t have ebough money to lend laptops. Same for connectivity. Not everything is on broadband. Schools making money advertising on billboards and lockers to pay for things like this.

When not everyone, has a phone, pair/triple up. she also can get laptops. [what happens when everyone is poor?]. In India, very poor people have a phone because it is a life changer. Don’t need a smartphone. Can learn by SMS.

We’ve been hearing about the disuption of the textbook market for years. Think will be delivered on tablets and the real question is how to get people to pay for them. Need to take advantage of tech and not just make paper look nicer. A textbook limits you to one point of view [or collates info]. Also allows making it better suited for ESL or kids reading below grade level. The White House announced last week that they will be pushing a guide/advice for digital textbooks.

 

Future of higher ed. Will colleges survive

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I attended Social media Week‘s future of higher ed talk.  See my notes on the K-12 version or my notes on the higher ed version in this post.

  • Traditional schools didn’t start online classes because didn’t think could do it as well. Included a shot at University of Phoenix. Social media is the first time the tools are there to support it. [I got my masters at Regis University. I think they did well because they had started with correspondence classes and saw how to enhance that model online.]
  • Anything you learned in college you could have learned from a textbook. It is higher ed done right that makes the impact. Goal was to recreate campus online. Only let in students who could get in on campus and add interactions/networking with students. However, it is also about socialization and a safe environment to learn how to interact with the world. More undergrad interest in a semester online than an entire undergrad degree online.
  • Expects more grad school online because more mature students, less expensive, fits life better. [regis had a work experience requirement to “screen” for maturity].
  • Education outstrips inflation by two to three percent a year because salaries go up and we add technology. Since this compounds, it is approaching infeasible. [it isn’t now?]. Can be less expensive by moving lecture online/interactive/self quiz. The classroom is for discussion. Or the online classroom. [regis did this well]
  • Interesting conflict: onkine students can learn at different pace but need to engage/discuss together.
  • Small programs don’t scale. Need a lot of students to recover investment for good course/program. To build scale, you need funding. At sone point, you can’t add more strong programs.
  • It is much harder to teach online. You have to prepare much more.

stanford’s ai class final feedback

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I just completed the “final” for Stanford’s free online course – ai-class.  Ironic to post this the day after Stanford dropped their bid to come to New York.  It was taught by two Stanford professors – Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun.  I’ve sprinked my impressions througout the description.

How I found out

I found out from a student on the Stuyvesant high school robotics team.  There was also an article in the New York Times in August.

Why I took it

The topic sounded interesting.  I went to graduate school online and participate in the online forum coderanch.com.  I know that I enjoy learning while having the opportunity to discuss (or read discussions) from my classmates.  And I was very curious how the experiment in a massively distributed class would work out!  It went well.

How it worked

Area What I liked What could be better next time
Lectures 1-4 minute video segments.  Makes it easy to watch partial lectures at a time.  Great for busy people! I live in a good bandwidth area.  If I didn’t (or was traveling) a downloaded version or text dump would help.
Quizzes I loved the interactivity as you went.  When I was in college, I actively participated in lectures and it helped me learn.  I missed that in online classes and you completely nailed it!  I have no problem with asking things that haven’t been covered yet – it makes you think.  I also liked how later in the course, the professors started sharing if a quiz was meant to be easy or hard so you knew if you were overthinking. The only thing that bothered me on the quizzes was the tab order being broken, but this was fixed.
Homework Built well with what was learned in class.  It helped me realize what I didn’t understand as fully and also to understand better. Would have liked some more programming/application.
Midterm I liked that it could be printed because I was out all day Saturday and was able to do part of the exam on the go.  I liked that it was over a weekend since there was less than a week to work on it.  Effort != duration.  I don’t reliably have 3-4 hours during the week to do it. It was easier than I expected.
Final I liked that the questions were harder than the midterm in that they required more understanding. On the midterm, I found the PDF to be equivalent.  On the final, I felt like there were some tips/pointers in the online version that were not represented in the PDF.
Programming The two programming assignments was fun. I also did some programming to calculate values, check answers and just play with some of the concepts. It would have been nice to have more of these.  Or even link to the programming assignments for the “real” class.
Forums There were two forums: reddit and aiqus.  I started on reddit because I already used reddit for other things.  I then switeched to aiqus when links for each lecture/question started appearing on ai-class.com. Making aiqus the official forum earlier would have helped.  While it was well moderated, I feel like it was running into a limitation of the stack exchange (I presume) software.  In particular, during the exams, the large # of closed questions drowned out discussion.  I would have also liked to see some more discussions like we had in grad school rather than “how do I solve #1.”  One way to faciliate that is to have an official question of the week linked to from the course.  For example, “how could we apply X to Y” or “discuss stanley; the robotic car”.
Progress Bar The stie has a tab where you can see your progress.  You could see your score on the quiz/homework/exam along with what % of the week’s lecture you have completed. The biggest thing I would change is to provide a list of what you get wrong. (I was informed you can expand the score to see this. I guess minor usability thing since I missed it). I want to know which questions I got wrong way more than I want to know my score.  I had to rewatch each homework question to find the things I got wrong so I could learn why.
Announcements The home page had announcements like corrections and due dates.  Having due dates prominent helps.  And even though scores don’t matter, the course is heavily cumulative so you can’t really fall behind.  Plus discussions vary on the progress of the course. Some corrections were posted on the home page and some were not.  Others were quietly made on twitter/facebook/in the question itself.  Would be nice to have this centralized.
Office hours I didn’t participate. I can’t possibly have feedback on something I didn’t look at!

My measure of success

I know a lot of things I didn’t before the class started.  That is *much* more important than the score.  While I did buy a used copy of the 2nd edition of the textbook, the class itself was free (and buying the book was optional.)  When I started, I figured I would try it and see if I wanted to stay with it.  Every week I learned a lot and it was enjoyable so I stuck with it. I enjoyed learning the theory.  In particular liked how it applied to robotics and language processing.

How I did

I’d like to repeat the part about learning being the important part here.  When one says that someone often chimes in “oh, that’s just because you didn’t do well.”  So I’ll share that my average is in the mid 90s.  (Not including the final which isn’t due yet.)

My comments to the upset people

  1. If you got something wrong, don’t make excuses. Getting it wrong is about learning. Even if it about communication.  Even if the “communication error” was at the Stanford end.  In the real world you communicate with people or unclear and ambiguous.  It’s a valuable life skill.
  2. Making mistakes it good.  Especially in a situation where it doesn’t matter.  I like to say that I’d rather make mistakes on CodeRanch than it work because the effects are smaller. Same thing here.  This doesn’t count towards your job or degree/GPA.  The only thing that matters is what you learn.  Getting something wrong makes it memorable.

What’s next?

They ended the class with a little humor such as a quiz question “did you understand?” (yes is the correct answer) and a homework question asking how Stanford did in the  2005 DARPAUrban Challenge (they won – an accomplishment the instructions should rightfully be proud of.)

A lot more courses are being offered next semester.  See the full list at class central.  I signed up for Human Computer Interaction and Software as  Service.  Two might be too much but I’m not clear on how much they overlap since the # weeks isn’t specified.

Other opinions

A lot of people wrote comments on the web.  My favorites:

  1. a perspective from Association for Learning Technology
  2. Seb Schmoller’s weekly comments